Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was a secret police force supported and funded by the state of Mississippi from 1956 to 1977. This state agency engaged in spying and “other” clandestine activities against the American public for the sole purpose of suppressing the civil rights movement, and maintaining segregation through out the American South.

This really happened.

The Sovereignty Commission was chartered in 1956 to officially “protect the sovereignty of the state of Mississippi and her sister states’ from federal interference. In practice, it worked to preserve segregation. In secret, the commission harassed and spied on activists, branding many of them racial agitators and communist infiltrators” (AP 8/19/98).
On March 17, 1998 after a 21 year long legal battle the ACLU was able to get over 132,000 files released to the public under the freedom of information act. Within those files were the names of over 80,000 informants. (the names are viewable at www.msaclu.com). 7,800 files are still being withheld for “security reasons”.

Detailed in the files released are countless minutia about the daily lives of ordinary people- lists of license tag numbers, where someone bought chicken feed, grades earned in World Geography and U.S. History, even the registration number on a birth certificate. As well as sophisticated dossiers on civil rights leaders. In fact, the Sovereignty Commission, had detailed files listing itineraries and contacts on James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three activists whose murders was detailed in the book Mississippi Burning months prior to their deaths.

It is now apparent (to me, having done the small amount of research that went into the creation of this node) that the Sovereignty Commission worked in coordination with the Ku Klux Klan to enact a conspiracy against American Citizens. The Sovereignty Commission would provide the KKK with the whereabouts and detailed information about specific targeted individuals which the KKK would then harass, scare, intimidate, threaten, abuse, assault, rape, and murder with the stated goal of terrorizing African Americans, and thereby suppress the civil rights movement.

All of this was paid for out of the annual Mississippi State Budget, and approved annually by the Mississippi congress.

I have been raised in an era in which the term “Gestapo tactics” is used daily, and indoctrinated by various propaganda and cultural mores into believing that other countries do this to their Citizens. But this happened in my country in my lifetime.